[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

Brian Hechinger wonko at arkham.ws
Sun Mar 24 10:34:57 CST 2002


On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 06:04:57PM +1100, Scott Howard wrote:
> (2x Ultra 1-170's, 512Mb memory, moving a few gigs of mail _each_ per days)
> 
> > Modern mail Unix servers are always I/O bound -- never CPU bound.
> 
> For a small shop perhaps... not for anyone running a reasonable sized mail
> server.

i think we are all leaving out a small detail here.  anyone running a reasonable
sized mail server has a reasonable sized internet connection.  UE4500 at work
sitting behind multiple T3 lines for example.  but what about that guy with the
56k dialup line?  compression would do him no end of good, and would cause
almost no impact on any other mail server.  56k is just too slow to cause any
sort of serious load on anyone trying to compress/decompress that stream.  i
think bill pointed it out, this is a choice between cpu and bandwidth.

-brian
--
"Oh, shut up Buddha."  -Jesus Christ (South Park)



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